interviews
Pain Is The Price of Consciousness
by Max Moinian
September 17, 2019
This interview with Max Moinian was conducted and condensed by frank news. Max was the co-editor of our May 2018 issue on Urban Planning.
frank: Hi! Tell us about yourself and Future Earth.
Max: I am Max Moinian, I have a Master's in Urban Design from MIT, and Future Earth is a climate change education platform, right now just on Instagram. It’s a newborn baby I had with Steph Shepherd, who is a total social media and marketing genius. We think our combined brains are good parenting. Good information that is enticing and digestible.
This all happened because mutual friends told us we were both climate change crazy ladies. We met and finished each other’s sentences. She convinced me that more celebrities would engage in environmentalism if the cause was packaged for them. So we tried a rebranding exercise. Make it cool and sexy. Do for the treehugger what Gloria Steinem did for feminism, if you will. But also survey what’s out there and fill in the gaps.
Plastics have suddenly become the environmental villain on social media.
I’m not mad at that, plastics are a gateway drug to environmentalism, but let’s take it a step further and talk about petrochemicals and how the same shit making those bottles is in your activewear and household products, and powering your car and house.
Basically what we're doing is trying to visually represent information we're reading, and make it enticing and clear for Instagram. I'll do the heavy lifting and read through the dense reports, make three-step guides, and report back on Instagram. Everything from science lessons, to consumer and lifestyle tips, ways you can get involved, and movies to watch. It’s imperative to me that we reflect on the psychological, personal aspect about learning about climate change. My own journey was so emotional and I found it hard to find a shoulder to lean on and people to have those conversations with.
Facts aren’t everything. Feelings are facts too.
How did you end up focusing on climate issues?
It's crazy to think that years of Ivy League education, undergrad at Barnard, Master's at MIT, and you know, private school before that – all of it – never touched on the very rudimentary and basic information about climate change that everyone needs to know. It was never presented to us, I read headlines but they never stuck, and somehow I got away with ignoring it all of those years.
via Max Moinian thesis presentation deck
Then there I was at MIT – the grand narrative is how do we design and protect cities from the coming environmental perils? So, sea level rise, temperature rise, extreme weather, pollution, deforestation…. All of it from a policy and design standpoint. I focused on design, so, seawalls and engineering systems to address the consequences of global warming. But what about the causes? Why can’t we start there? Why aren’t we talking about it?
In design studios, we were tasked to protect cities by building things.
We had projection data for the year 2100 without fully understanding what's causing sea level rise in the first place.
It really bothered me. I felt like this world of mobilized urban designers and architects are at the end of a line that starts with the science, goes through technology and policy, and leaves us with a very limited, pathetic toolkit. Real innovation doesn’t happen at the end of the line, you know?
We're still that client-based discipline where you just have to do whatever the client says and not necessarily what you stand for. I busted my ass to get an internship at BIG because I wanted to work on the BIG U. I got disenchanted in three seconds. I remember one night I called my advisor and told him I was morally conflicted.
We were using taxpayer money to protect people, but mostly to protect valuable assets.
To be fair, the opportunities the firm had were completely restricted by policy and bureaucratic nonsense. But I wanted no part in it. He told me I had to make the choice of working within the system to change it, or go full radical. And I guess I’ve been testing the outlaw territory ever since.
via Max Moinian thesis presentation deck
What's the best way to a) begin your personal education in climate change, and b) retain information without feeling constantly overwhelmed and emotionally drained?
I know better than anyone how hard it is to commit time in your life to this topic. I didn’t do it until I had six months to research and write a thesis. I thought, I'm going to devote to learning about climate change now because when else can I do this? I wasn’t worried that climate science had no clear place in urban design. I knew I’d figure out a way to get away with it.
I spent most of those days making a matcha latte, getting back in bed, and reading a book for the morning. Then writing and drawing in the afternoon. It was a glorious time of ultimate brain activation. I loved being isolated in my little academic bubble. Not everyone can do that, not everyone wants to do that, no one has the time. So here’s a cheat sheet:
Step one: start with the basic facts. How does climate change and what does that mean for the future? But also, how do we get data and make projections? What are the main causes? What are our options? Your resource is the IPCC. Don't listen to what anyone else has to say except the IPCC and climate scientists. And don’t be ashamed if you need a refresh on middle school science. There's a textbook version of IPCC reports for young adults that I reference constantly.
Step two: a brief history of how climate science has been politicized. Seeing how the proof and solutions have been muzzled by Big Oil and politics is mindblowing.
It showed me that we are not as dependent on the systems we rely on today as we may think.
It also made me hyper-skeptical but in a good way. I love Naomi Oreskes and Naomi Klein, two badass women who write clearly but also have documentaries and interviews you can watch.
Step three: take care of yourself. It took a few breakdowns for me to admit that I wasn’t invincible and this was seriously heavy shit. It’s emotional, and most people connect emotionally. I've read the facts, I know the projections. But it never registered for me. You know, but at the same time you don’t know.
Because my capacity to imagine what two degrees of warming looks like is low. Because this is the most daunting, helpless topic possible.
This is the equivalent of the atom bomb. This is the environmental narrative of our time, and it's really hard to do anything when you know that the problem is so far beyond your little self, your community, your country. It's the entire world, with no silver-bullet solution, and no end in sight, and that's fucking scary.
Yes, it really is.
One time, when I was in the depths of knowing too much, like borderline depression, I was sitting with a professor who will probably never know how much she means to me. As I was talking I think she could just tell something was not right, and she put her arm on my shoulder and said, "Honey, you need to read some Rebecca Solnit." So I bought this book Hope in the Dark and I've gone back to it maybe five times already. It was the hug that I needed. I needed to know that there are people that know more than me and they are still fighting. And I needed to see that they had happy normal lives, or at least appeared to.
Another game-changing book is Living In Denial by Kari Norgaard. The psychology of inaction. She says,
"Pain is the price of consciousness. To be conscious in the world today is to be aware of vast suffering and unprecedented peril."
No one wants to feel like that. Everyone has a threshold, a cap to how much of those kind of feelings you can harbor. And we're all maxing out on our personal issues, our family, our life. You know, millennial burnout or whatever.
Who wants towillingly experience that much pain?
Right.
To exist is painful enough.
Sometimes I get pissed off watching people go about their day, nonchalant, like parked with the engine running, A/C blasting with the windows down, watching TV on their iPhone. And I feel like this person doesn't care. And I’m almost jealous at how simple life seems to be in their mind, so guilt free and chill. But to Norgaard that's actually really difficult to do: “Apathy is the mask of suffering.” It's really hard to suppress all those existential thoughts and feelings, but because it's so much harder to actually deal with them, we lean towards denial.
Being hyper-aware is a massive burden. I've never sought out therapy in my life – I just started seeing a psychologist who specializes in climate anxiety. Being an activist and educator means I’m committing to VIP care for my mental health. Because that is my MVP!
As Solnit says, “Joy doesn’t betray but sustains activism.”
interviews
An Interview With Anika Manzoor
by Anika Manzoor
September 10, 2018
Tatti: Would you start by telling me a bit about your activist history?
Anika: The thing about my activist history is the fact that I didn't really go out seeking activist opportunities. I didn't really know much about it. My family's from Bangladesh. When I first visited Bangladesh I had this revelation of what injustice looks like, because it's a very stratified country in terms of income and poverty. I think I had that kind of burgeoning sense of justice, but I didn't know how, I wasn't thinking about, "Oh, we need to ...". I didn't know that I could even do anything about it.
Four years after that experience, I had been invited to this awareness raising session in my community. My friend invited me and told me about the lack of girls education in developing countries, and how Bangladesh is one of the countries that needed the most action on this issue. That piqued my interest. At the end of it we were invited by the woman who led it to join her in creating a campaign to address the issue. All of it really was the fact that I was invited, rather than I was seeking out that kind of opportunity. I think that's really important. What we focus on with this activism project is trying to invite people, trying to bring people into the fold, because that allows us to reach a lot more people than we would have, and kind of activate people to join this global effort to bring justice in communities.
I was 12 years old when I got involved, and then stayed involved throughout middle school and high school.
Then we also set up a scholarship program in Mali, Africa, and did various fundraising activities. That was kind of the extent of our activism. I engaged in that throughout middle school and high school. Then in college I still stayed involved with School Girls Unite.
During college I realized that being part of School Girls Unite was such a transformative experience for me. That kind of empowerment through activism is something that I wanted to share with other people who were like me, who understood these global injustices, but didn't really know how to get started. That became my mission, and evolved over the past couple of years until I decided to go back to the Youth Activism Project and work with Wendy to scale our efforts.
Tatti: What do you find most effective for bringing about change through activism?
Anika: That's an interesting question because I think it's actually a lot easier than what people think. This policy advocacy focus has been our bread and butter for the last 14 years. We're currently working on this guide. Our goal is to really provide accessible tools for young people to know how to engage in these processes. In that guide we pretty much provide concrete steps about where you can look for your local, state, and federal representatives. How do you know who they are? How do you know what kind of issues they're working on? Then how can you enter those spaces? What is the best way to position yourself?
We go through all of that, and it's really not that complicated. You just have to know where to look and what to say. Meeting with decision makers is something, in my experience, that has been incredibly empowering for me. We focus on that in terms of a key aspect.
We encourage people to explore a variety of tactics. We focus on policy advocacy, and there's a demand for that as well. Young people want to engage in that kind of activism. Protests are always a great way to rally support and bring about awareness of an issue. We really emphasize arts advocacy. We emphasize other ways to reach out to your decision makers, like doing a postcard writing campaign. We encourage our youth activists to think outside the box when it comes to their advocacy, because they want to be noticed. We're really supportive of the wide gamut of activist strategies.
In terms of what might not be as effective, I think people give a lot of flack to this whole idea of slactivism and internet activism. But I think there's also a purpose for that as well. There's a purpose for a viral hashtag. The internet is a great way to mobilize people for your cause. It's just, you definitely need to build upon social media tools. You can't just rely on that to do activism. That is definitely something that we firmly feel.
Tatti: It's so easy to participate now because of social media, but that also means that those with the largest voices aren't always those who are most informed. Can that be detrimental to a cause?
Anika: That's definitely something to watch out for, but I wouldn't want to say that it totally invalidates the use of the internet and social media as a tool to kind of promote awareness and bring people to the cause. I think it's something that seasoned activists should watch out for and combat. But I think there's so much good that comes out from using social media and the internet that it's definitely not an argument to not use it.
It's fruitless to say that people shouldn't use social media, because it's such an integral part of our lives now that people are always going to get on their soapbox on Facebook or Instagram or Twitter or whatever preferred platform. It's sort of this beast that we can't really ignore. We have to figure out how to guardrail against the negative aspects of activism as it relates to social media.
Tatti: Why is youth is so important to you? Why is that the group you decided to commit to and empower?
Anika: There's a lot of reasons for that. The first thing that comes to my mind is the individual empowerment. We focus on adolescents specifically. Youth is often used as this umbrella term to talk about people from childhood to early adulthood, and even kind of people reaching 30, which I think is pretty firmly adulthood. But somehow that's still youth.
Adolescence is such a tricky time. Not just in the United States, but around the world. There are so many pressures for young people to be a certain way. They're really coming into their selves during this time. Activism for me was this incredible outlet. It was so crucial for my development as a human being, and protected me from a lot of dumb things that affect the lives of young people. Like, "Oh. Am I liked enough?". All these anxieties that young people have. I was focused on something way beyond that through my activism. That kind of helped me, there was a higher purpose for me because I was engaged in this kind of work. I think that was just so powerful.
That's my primary motivating factor. Sharing that with other people who might not have access to it. Then of course the reason why it's so empowering is because you are actually producing change in your community. You're being a leader in your community and in your world. Young people are incredible activists. They bring a lot of assets to the whole activist world. They're idealistic. They're creative. They don't think like adults, so they're not as jaded or as confined by expectation. I think they have a little bit more flexibility to think outside the box, and command attention, because at least at this point it's not common. As an organization we want to change that. We want to make this common.
I think providing something really meaningful to this space is another reason why we focus so much on the adolescent group.
Then finally, these are our future voters. I think the biggest thing that we need to focus on is preparing them to be engaged citizens as they exercise their right to vote as they continue into adulthood. We believe that naturally, if you are exposed to these kinds of values and practices as a young person, it will inevitably continue on into your adulthood. We're living in a time when the rate of voting and engaging in political participation is at a global decline. We need to fix that for this rising generation.